How to avert computer catastrophes

Last week, as I was working on one of my three final graduate course projects, my laptop decided it was a good time to give out. I spent a futile 15 minutes resetting the battery and holding down the power button trying to get a response, but to no avail: my laptop was done for good.

At this point a year ago, I would have been sobbing uncontrollably, my semester wreaked in the final week. However, this time, I set down my laptop, walked to the school library, logged onto a computer, downloaded my files from Google Drive where they had been synced up until the minute my laptop went dark, and was working on my final projects within 30 minutes. All in all, thanks to automatic back-ups, instead of losing an entire semester, I lost two lines of one report.

This near-tragedy illustrates two points that anyone who does any work on a computer must keep in mind:

1. You will have a complete computer failure sometime soon
2. This can be either a soul-crushing loss or no big deal depending on the safeguards you have in place

Having witnessed firsthand the destruction wreaked on fellow students by computer failures, I finally installed Google Drive backup and sync a few months ago. This is one of a number of services that will run in the background on your computer, saving all files (or select ones you choose) to the cloud where you can access them from any computer in the world.

There’s a saying I’m quite fond of known as the Rule of Two: “Two is one and one is none.” (I first heard this from CGPGrey on the Cortex Podcast). What these means is that if you only have one of some necessity, it might as well not exist because you will probably inevitably lose it. When it comes to file storage, if your files are located only on your laptop, they might as well not be saved at all for how vulnerable you are.

Signing up for a back-up service tends to be one of those things that everyone says they will get around to but never actually implements (I was in this group for a long time). However, having proper back-ups should be a necessity before you start doing any work you don’t want to lose!

In today’s world of ridiculously cheap storage, there is no excuse for not having multiple copies of your files available in the cloud. For students, you might have free unlimited storage through Google Drive which means you can store anything you want (I haven’t tested the limits of unlimited, but have friends with multiple terabytes saved). For everyone else, 100 GB of storage is only $2/month on Google Drive and other options are equally reasonable. I know the moment my screen went blank I would gladly have paid $100 / year to know that my files were safe.

The exact backup route you choose does not matter, but what is important is ensuring that your files live in multiple places (usb sticks are better than nothing, but cloud backup is the best option). I prefer automatic syncing because humans are fallible. With a service that syncs your files by itself, there is little risk you will get in the way of technology helping you out! This is one area where you should be content to let acomputer think for you. (Along the same lines, if a program offers the option to auto-save files, make sure to enable it to save as often as possible!)

Whenever I see the little Google Drive sync icon whirring away on my laptop, I take a moment to appreciate the wonders of automatic file backups. The next time my laptop inevitably fails, I know that it will be only a minor, recoverable inconvenience. Can you say the same?

I welcome feedback and discussion and can be reached on Twitter @koehrsen_will.